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Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Intellect
Wisdom

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.
Thomas Sowell
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'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'.
Thomas Sowell
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If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.
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Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
Thomas Sowell
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The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation.
Thomas Sowell
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Thomas Sowell
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If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
Thomas Sowell
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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Thomas Sowell
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Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.
Thomas Sowell
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Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.
Thomas Sowell
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The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
Thomas Sowell
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The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.
Thomas Sowell
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An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
Thomas Sowell
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Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
Thomas Sowell
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Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
Thomas Sowell
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People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Thomas Sowell
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Someone once said that many bad policies are just good policies that have been carried too far. For example, we have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we tolerate the immigration into our country of millions of intolerant people who hate millions of Americans who are already here.
Thomas Sowell
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...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
Thomas Sowell
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People who decry the fact that businesses are in business just to make money seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
Thomas Sowell
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The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.
Thomas Sowell